Etanidrobus

Holly Domney, a student on the Creative Writing and Publishing MA at City University London, won the Orwell Society Dystopian Short Story Competition 2016 with this gripping tale available to view and download here: Etanidrobus.

• The judges of the competition were Richard Blair, son of George Orwell and Patron of the Orwell Society, Dr Julie Wheelwright, of City University London (she did not assess Holly Domney’s story to avoid conflict of interest issues), Dr Luke Seaber, of University College London, and Professor Richard Lance Keeble, of the University of Lincoln and chair of the Orwell Society. The judges commented on Holly Domney’s story: “The writing is very striking and emotionally intense while the imagery is extremely powerful. The horrific dystopian vision of the world run by women is totally original. Holly begins describing the fantasies of the crewmen of an idyllic women-led world. Yet that fantasy is subverted by a grim reality. There is real dramatic tension as Holly describes the build-up of an operation to remove the seed from the narrator’s sexual organs (frightening, indeed, as the torture scenes in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four).”